Internews Center for Innovation & Learning

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Research

An integral component to the Internews Center for Innovation & Learning pilots is the accompanying research that measures success and failure. A research agenda is developed in conjunction with every project at the Center in an effort to produce information that can be used and adapted by practitioners throughout media and development communities and beyond. Understanding why something does or doesn’t work is the cornerstone to learning and advancing our mission of understanding and catalyzing the information exchange.

Our information ecosystems research is taking flight in exciting directions, both internally and externally. Within Internews, the Center is contributing to the research design for information ecosystem assessments in additional countries in Africa, the Middle East, and Central Asia.

Hurricane Sandy hit the eastern seaboard of the US on October 22, 2012. According to the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) in the region, more than 23,000 people were uprooted and forced into temporary shelters and roughly 8.5 million households lost power. The Centers for Disease Control reported a total of 117 hurricane-related deaths, the majority of which occurred in New and New Jersey; the most common cause of death was drowning. Tragically, approximately half of the drowning deaths occurred in flooded homes located in areas under mandatory evacuation.

Myanmar’s recent relaxing of political, economic, and social restrictions has provided a unique opportunity to conduct research in Myanmar’s ethnic states. This report on Mon State’s information ecosystem is the first in a planned series of studies into the demographic, news media, and information dynamics that characterize Mon State as well as Myanmar’s six other ethnic states—Chin, Kachin, Kayah (Karenni), Kayin (Karen), Rakhine (Arakan), and Shan.

We are currently working on a research project called Embracing Change: The Critical Role of Information, funded by the Rockefeller Foundation. The first step in the research process was to lay out what we mean by information ecosystems, trace the underlying theories, and articulate key questions that we want the research to answer. We now have a working definition of information ecosystems:

The very first pilot experiment that The Internews Center for Innovation and Learning supported was a Social Innovation Camp in Bosnia, in 2011. Following the Bosnia Social Innovation Camp, Internews held a number of similar events in different countries during 2011, 2012, and 2013. Some of these events were called Innovation Labs; others were called Camps. All of these events shared much in common with the first Bosnia Camp, with some variation in structure, goals, and outcomes.